Jews and Christians in America learn early on to avoid discussing religion with each other.
Crossing boundaries can cause discomfort and pain, yet we live in an integrated society
where friendships and interfaith relationships make avoidance a poor option.
This film is a journey about crossing this divide.
I have a couple of friends of Fossil who are Jewish and I find myself not scared of them,
but very hesitant. Very kind of, I don't want to offend you if I say something because I'm not
quite sure what your religion is. Whereas if I went up to one of my Christian friends,
I could pretty much say anything and they, I'd have an understanding of what they believed
and what was accepted with them. And interacting with the Jewish community, I find myself very kind
of like, are you going to be offended if I say this? So I think, I don't want to say that I try
to keep my talk to a minimum, but at the same time, I just, I try not to put anything out there that could be very offensive.
Do you know that's a kneeler? Tell me your sins, my son.
Well, I should mention that I'm Jewish. That's no sin. Oh, good.
At school, people know me as the short Jew. Girl, they're like, hey, do you know Lexi?
Wait, is that, is that the short Jew girl? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's not at school because of that yom, yom, poor thing.
Yeah. And everybody just like knows what's going on in my life based on the Jewish holidays and stuff.
And there was a third grader that came up to me one day on the bus and he told me that I was going to go to hell because I was Jewish.
And I think that changed my perspective on a lot of things because once you hear that from somebody, you really don't care anymore what people think about your religion
because if that's all that they can tell you that you're going to hell no matter what, just because you're Jewish, you really don't care about how others view your religion
because it just doesn't matter to you because that's their view, that's your view.
If Jews were not to take a pathway through Jesus, our understanding of Scripture and particularly the New Testament development of God's redemptive history
would be that they would not know God in a personal way so that they would not experience His blessings eternally.
But I remember one time in science class there was a bunch of us sitting around and it came up that one of the boys in our group was Jewish
and people were just asking him, you know, how do you feel as a Jewish going to a Catholic school, how come we never knew you were Jewish
and those sorts of questions and he seemed very reluctant to discuss it.
He seemed almost embarrassed that people knew and I was surprised by that.
He'd been there for two or three years and known these kids most of his life and they didn't know he was Jewish.
This I witnessed as a Jew growing up next to a very, very Catholic community in Cincinnati where when I told the other kids that I was playing with, the Catholic kids
that I was Jewish, they said, oh well, you're going to hell and that's very common in American life where a Jewish kid will come forward
up to that point has not revealed where he's coming from or what she worships and how she professes religion and is told you're going to hell.
You have no salvation.
One of my friends was talking to me and we got into a discussion about religion and he got really upset because he strongly believes in Christianity
and everything that Christianity is about, but he doesn't want me to go to hell.
I don't know what it's like to have a baptism. I don't know what you're supposed to feel, but I felt something.
When I went in that water and when I was held under there, I felt some sort of revelation, like it was some sort of message from God
that, you know, I shouldn't do this. I mean, after I came out of the water, I didn't feel like a Christian.
I felt like even more of a Jew.
What are you talking about?
I'm just saying something happened to me there that told me someone or something was saying, don't do this.
Be happy for who you are. You're Jewish and that's okay.
Okay, well, I need for you to be a Christian before I marry you.
You don't have any Jews up in your country, do you?
Jews? We have many Jews that cause a lot of the one who like the money.
Yeah. That's one of their traits, all right.
In my country, the big nose people, they make a lot of trouble. They make trouble here in America, too.
Everywhere they are.
Yes.
They were so bad in Germany in controlling the economy and all the money and stuff.
That's why when the Nazis got in power, they said, we're going to have a final solution to these Jews.
We're going to help the Jews.
Kill them all.
After becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD,
Christian debated what to do with the Jews who until then were viewed as siblings.
The common view was that the Jews should be persecuted and killed.
The other view was that the Jews be kept because they bear witness to Jesus but be held as in fear for their blindness.
These views are profoundly expressed in middle-aged Christian art.
In this stained-glass window from the 15th century, a regular Colossia on the left
represented Christianity rights triumphantly while being crowned by a divine hand.
On the right is Sinagoga, bent and blindfolded, representing Judaism.
With a crown fallen and a royal strand broken, a divine hand is piercing her head.
Images of a Colossian Sinagoga can be found in many churches in Europe even today.
These views were reflected in Catholic services until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
During Holy Week, there was a prayer for the Jews.
After the Second Vatican Council, that prayer was changed.
Before the Second Vatican Council, there was a series of prayers for the world during the Passion.
We prayed for the perfidious Jews that their blindness might be taken away
and that they might recognize salvation in Jesus.
The new prayer is very short and it says, let us pray for the Jewish people who are the first to hear the word of God
and who have been given the covenant by God.
As a Lutheran Christian, one of the things I carry with me is my heritage of Martin Luther.
You may or may not know that Luther himself spoke forcefully against Jews and Judaism.
Adolf Hitler even quoted Martin Luther a number of times in speeches about Jews and Judaism.
It's one of the unfortunate parts of my spiritual heritage that Martin Luther took part in that Jew bashing, if you will.
In the town church in Wittenberg, there is on the town church where Martin Luther preached regularly.
In the Jewish quarter of town, there was a statue facing the Jewish quarter of a number of pigs
meant to mock the Jewish inhabitants of that section of town.
If you know anything about Jewish history, especially about Western European Jewish history,
or even Eastern European Jewish history, there's just rivers of blood that have been shed
that have been caused by these charges.
I don't know if it's just Christians or people in general feel reluctant to ask Jewish people about the holocaust
because you want to ask them, is it something you're still sensitive about, is it something that is still relevant in your life today?
But you almost feel that by asking that question, you're discounting the experience as a whole.
You're saying, oh, it happened then, not now, it doesn't matter anymore.
But it does matter.
The holocaust and that the repression in World War II is kind of, don't touch it.
Leave it alone, back away slowly, and try to get on with your day.
It's just something that's always there, like the elephant in the room when there's a Jewish person that you're communicating with.
You kind of, you see them and then you see the concentration camps.
You see the pictures you see in all the movies about World War II and all the destruction and violence
and everything just comes rushing back to you and you're kind of like, I have to stay away from this.
How can I do that in the calmest way possible?
You see, the Jews today believe that Jesus is not the Christ.
They believe that the Christ, the Messiah, and the word Christ is just the Greek word corresponding to the Hebrew word Messiah,
they say that the Christ is still coming.
They believe that the Messiah is still coming.
First John chapter 2 reads, who is a liar?
But he that denied that Jesus is the Christ.
He is anti-Christ that denied the Father and the Son.
So anyone who lives in that says there's a Christ but it's not Jesus, that's an anti-Christ religion and that's what Judaism is today.
Too many Christians take the Bible in its plain sense and since it's 2,000 years old and has its own literary genre,
if you take it in its plain sense you are missing it.
A literal translation sometimes misreads the text and that takes some sophistication.
That's why this is so difficult.
People who insist on a plain reading of the text and just gather college students together and they just bring without any education
and they just sit down and talk about the Bible, they are going to tend to read it in a literal sense.
I understand that there are many passages in the Christian scriptures, especially around the trial of Jesus before the Jewish Sanhedrin and that.
Passages that could be read by brothers and sisters in the Jewish faith who would see that as very condemnatory on the part of the church toward the Jews
as they read those passages.
But when we're at our best in the church and this has been throughout history, we've not always acted out of our best
but when we're at our best interpreting the text, we see the whole of the Jewish scriptures as well as the New Testament being the story of all of us.
And so when the priest in the Sanhedrin says so flippantly about the life of this one human being, let his blood be upon our people,
we understand at our best as Christians that that priest was speaking words for all of humankind, not just the Jews,
but for all of those of us who don't like to be confronted by what is real and good and holy in life.
The danger is that an unenlightened reading of the text, a fundamentalist reading of the text, or the plain reading of the text,
takes this as a description of all Jews, including Jews today, then it becomes very destructive.
So Jews represent inauthentic religion and Christians represent authentic religion.
Whereas I think an enlightened reading of the text is we've got prophets warning their own people and we have to take them as warnings to us too
and we have to be careful that if we don't understand what's going on, then we use that text to stereotype all Jews, including Jews today,
and that leads to hatred and war and tragedy. And that's what's happened.
The Christkiller charge is centered on Jesus' trial, where allegedly the Jews call for freeing a notorious murderer instead of Jesus who they condemn to death.
The passion of the Christ film follows a long tradition of portraying the Jews as instigators and the Romans as sympathetic bystanders.
The people who did the kinds of killing to which Jesus was subjected were the Romans, clearly.
And oh, by the way, we find out that Pontius Pilate was called back to Rome because of his cruelty.
And here is a guy who in terms of an exonerating New Testament that needed to separate itself from Judaism, that made the statement it was the Jews.
What better way to separate yourself from a people than to blame them for the death of what you hold most precious?
It is my belief and my understanding of the Scriptures that the Jews did not kill Christ, but that in essence all of humanity, by our sinfulness and shortcoming, nailed Jesus to the cross.
Jews and Gentiles, all of us included in that, that we nailed him to the tree there at the city limits of Jerusalem that day.
And so to place the blame on Jews more than to place blame on oneself is clearly wrong.
But I don't think it makes a difference who really killed him, like it could have been anyone, like of any religion.
It might not have even been Judaism or Christianity, so I really don't feel it's even worth blaming anybody for it because really it wouldn't make a difference because it happened such a long time ago.
And I feel that it did happen a very long time ago and you can't place blame on people today for something that happened that long ago.
Well, I think that historically it's probably been more the context of not saying what we needed to say that left people with the impression that somehow or other the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.
I don't personally believe that. In fact, the Romans are the ones who actually put Christ to death.
The problem is in the retroactive blame on an entire people as if it were a theological necessity to blame the Jewish people for the death of Jesus and therefore justify the kind of persecution and oppression
that Christians levied against Jews, particularly in Europe for over a thousand years. It doesn't make any sense.
The notion that the persecution of the Jews is their own fault is still surprisingly wildly held.
So God's people who rebelled have to learn the hard way that that's not really the best way to do it. But it all started with the synagogue of Satan.
It all started with that deception inside God's church and look where it led them.
Look at the pain and the suffering that they had to endure because they wouldn't believe God, they wouldn't let Him lead them.
The other Jewish claim for superiority before God was passed over to the Christians has been central to the Christian narrative.
And that is a notion that the church took the place of the Jewish people in the favor of God and that the Christians then were the ones that most nearly followed God's will.
And because the Jews rejected Jesus as God's own Son, the incarnation of God, which is at the very center of our story as Christians,
that somehow the church then took a superior position over the people of Israel.
There are a lot of us in the Christian community that don't buy that, but it's been very a large and clear strand of Christian self-understanding throughout the centuries.
We don't call our scriptures the Old Testament.
And I always know somebody who's ignorant of his Judaism if he starts talking about the Bible as being the Old Testament.
But the point is, our Bible we know is the Tanakh or the Hebrew Scriptures.
It is only when you have a new covenant and then you speak in terms of the Old Covenant that you're talking about supersession.
You're saying our covenant has taken the place of that which was agreed between God and Israel or God and the Israelites or God and the Jewish people.
Well, that's why I say supersessionism is a more difficult thing to deal with than just the bad characterization of Pharisees.
Because Christians have these claims that there's no salvation outside of Jesus.
And if you have that claim, then you have to sort of look at your own religion as the only true religion.
Which isn't really Catholic doctrine, but Catholics are confused about that.
I don't believe that Christianity supersedes Judaism.
The word I would choose would be completes it, brings it to its fullness.
While the Second Vatican Council removed some of the most overreaching aspects of the Judeo-Christian divide, much progress is still needed.
But is meaningful dialogue possible? And how can it be achieved?
I mean, you really think that I'm lost because I don't accept Jesus Christ as my savior.
You think I'm your inferior. Be honest.
Oh, no, not inferior.
Come on.
No, that's very different.
But wait, you think you have a truth.
I don't think you're inferior.
But do you think you have a truth that I do not see?
Yes.
Then aren't I not biological means inferior?
No, you're where I was once because I was all confused myself.
But then that's condescending.
And I think what we are going through in modern times is the experience of pluralism.
And pluralism, we always had differences, but it was easy to deal with the differences because the other people were just wrong.
Didn't have to worry about it.
And we're not afraid to those others. And we're working with those others.
And we have come to respect and love them.
And so we can't just say they're wrong because they're other.
So pluralism is a huge change.
I feel that one of the ways that we can, I guess you say, work with a situation where there are different theological views of another religion
to come together like we have today and have respectful discussions where we bring up the issues, bring up the things that we don't know about.
And I'm not sure how to say this without offending you.
So I'm going to ask you respectfully and respond respectfully.
And I think that one of the best ways to learn is to ask questions and just be open to any direction a discussion may take.
I believe that there can be a dialogue in a situation where, say for example, an evangelical group who believes firmly that the only purpose in life is to be saved through acceptance of Jesus.
And another group like the Jewish community that has absolutely nothing to do with that theology and will not.
Can there be a dialogue in that context? Absolutely. Why not?
Talk about it. Don't be afraid of somebody telling you, I understand what you're saying and I don't accept it and here's why.
And here's how we believe. Here's the information that we're sharing.
Absolutely there can be dialogue.
However, it takes courage. We can come to dialogue for the sake of sharing information and primarily for the sake of building trust.
I think it's important that I learned that some Christian people feel wary about talking to Jewish people because they're afraid of offending them and I never really thought about that.
But once you have it out there, then it's there and it's a lot easier to talk about it.
And once you've crossed that boundary, it's so much easier and it's so much more interesting because you really get all these different perspectives from people because I have talked to people like this.
And it's so interesting to hear how they've used different and how they're alike a lot of the time too.
And it's like, sure, it's an awkward conversation but it's awkward for everyone in the room so if you just be respectful then it's really not a big deal.
I think the greatest fear that people have with regard to that is that somehow or other when we affirm someone else's religious tradition that we're going to lose our own.
And the fact is that I have found personally that in talking with others about their faith and coming to some understanding of that which we share in common,
I have become even clearer about what it is I believe and what I hold to.
And so rather than it being a detractor from my own faith expression and my own understanding, it has become an affirmation.
I took a course on Judaism from a rabbi in Denver a number of years ago and found that very helpful.
But I think we need education programs, we need opportunities for conversation, we need to invite one another to some of our services.
I mean it'd be nice to invite a rabbi to attend the Holy Week services for a whole week and then give a course on what he heard.
And I think that it's interesting because talking to people, just even this discussion right here, it's helped me think about my religion and think about how my beliefs and how I can further show people but not in a pushy way
but just show people through love and kindness what Christianity is about and then try to take other people's religions and incorporate them with mine and see how I can grow as a person.
Out of this conversation, I really liked how I got to talk to Christians about the religion of Judaism and Christianity because in my school, religion never comes up and this was really interesting that I got to talk
unlike the perspectives of the Holocaust and how Jews and Christians can get along together.
In the course of 90 minutes, a group of interfaith youth march along a path that few of the peers have.
They overcame discomfort and awkwardness born by long history and misconceptions.
We live in times of unprecedented desire to heal old wounds.
The experience of this youth demonstrates that open and meaningful dialogue can usher a new page in the Jewish Christian narrative.
In the course of 90 minutes, a group of interfaith youth march along a path that few of the peers have.
The group of interfaith youth march along a path that few of the peers have.
We live in times of unprecedented desire to heal old wounds.
Thank you for watching.
